ChirpParade aims to be birdsong you can play.
A recording of a bird is one bird, once, in one place — loop it and the ear finds the loop immediately, because real song never repeats itself. ChirpParade computes every syllable as it sounds, so a phrase ever comes out twice the same way, and a note is a bird rather than a sample trigger.
What it carries instead of audio is contours. A bird syllable is not a note with a shape on it: it is a scribble, travelling several times further than the gap between its highest and lowest point and changing direction up to forty times, far too fast for an ordinary spectrogram to show. So 88 field recordings were segmented into single syllables, each tracked, fitted as a cosine series and
clustered by shape, and one real syllable from each cluster kept — 72 of them, 54 kB of coefficients and no audio at all. Each keeps its own measured duration as well as its shape, which is why a nightingale here runs from short syllables to long ones the way the recording does rather than repeating one length.
It features 62 parameters across the syllable, the voice, the tube above it, the phrase, the flock, drumming, distance and a full ADSR, with nine species — Whistler, Sparrow, Warbler, Budgie, Woodpecker, Crane, Goose, Piper and Screech — whose pitch, length, harmonic richness, roughness and rate are all medians measured from recordings of that bird. 18 factory presets ship, each checked by rendering it back and measuring it. Native CLAP for Linux and Windows.